There is, for instance, the tale of the time traveler who goes back into time and accidentally steps on a butterfly, thereby changing irrevocably the course of history (“A Sound of Thunder”). They’re like long-forgotten acquaintances-you know you’ve met them somewhere before. The best stories have a strange familiarity about them. So while the Everyman’s Library edition of The Stories of Ray Bradbury-which includes only 100 stories and runs a mere 1,059 closely printed pages-represents just a microscopic fraction of Bradbury’s work, it’s not a bad place to start. Two of his better-known novels, The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine, are story collections in disguise, and even Fahrenheit 451 began as “The Fireman,” a short story. (His daughter is his amanuensis he calls her on the telephone and she faxes him back the typed pages.) Thanks to Fahrenheit 451, now required reading for every American middle-schooler, Bradbury is generally thought of as a writer of novels, but his talents-particularly his mastery of the diabolical premise and the brain-exploding revelation-are best suited to the short form. As he approaches his 90 th birthday, he continues to publish, his pace slowed only slightly by a stroke that requires him to write by dictation. And late at night, with a flashlight, some little boy is going to peek under the covers and read The Martian Chronicles on Mars.”Įnjoy peeling back each remarkable layer of Bradbury’s life, as well as his treasured prose - words that grip as each landscape, conflict, and character emerges from the written page.Ray Bradbury is one of the most prolific writers of our time-and our parents’ time, and our grandparents’ time. They’ll be up on dead Mars with no atmosphere. “The thing that makes me happy is that I know that on Mars, two hundred years from now, my books are going to be read. In fact, his work has literally traveled out of this world - a digitized copy of The Martian Chronicles reached the Red Planet in 2008, aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander. To dive into Ray Bradbury’s work is to experience the complex, wondrous, and often troubling layers of human existence, as well as the possibilities beyond the limits of a small rocky planet called Earth. As a master storyteller, champion of creative freedom, space-age visionary, and guardian of the human heart, he has been embraced by millions across many generations and all walks of life. Ray Bradbury’s contribution to the literary landscape and our collective imagination made him one of the best-known writers of our time.
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